Hey everyone!
I'm thrilled to announce that Finamp, an open source Jellyfin music player, will have its first Hackathon starting next week, starting on Saturday, March 29th and continuing until Sunday, April 6th!
Get ready for over a week of improvements to your favorite open source music client for Jellyfin :D
This is a digital event happening on Finamp's GitHub repository and our beta Discord server.
Why Should I Care?
In case you don't know, Finamp is a music client for Jellyfin, that has been around for a few years at this point.
It is meant to be an app that is tailor-made for Jellyfin (and all its quirks), and elevates the listening experience beyond what the official Jellyfin apps can offer.
While Finamp is used and loved by many Jellyfin users, it's far from perfect. Companies like Plex or Spotify are able to create more polished and feature-rich applications because they have more money and developers to throw at the problem.
But we, as Jellyfin users and members of the open source and self-hosted communities, believe that this shouldn't stop us from trying to build the best free & open source apps we can, together with other members of the community!
That's why we need your help to improve the quality and capabilities of Finamp, to be one day on-par or even better than the likes of Plexamp or Spotify!
What Is the Goal of this Hackathon?
As part of our efforts to modernize Finamp and make it more pleasant to use, we started redesigning and re-implementing Finamp in back 2023, and started releasing beta versions of the redesigned version early last year.
Many important elements of the app have already been overhauled, most noticeably the player screen & queue, and the download system. The redesign didn't just change the looks of these elements, but also improved their features and usability over the old version.
But there's still a lot to do!
We planned this Hackathon to give our redesign efforts a much-needed boost, so that we can finally redesign the remaining parts of the app and then release the redesign as part of the stable version.
So that's the focus - re-designing & re-implementing existing parts of the app, as well as implementing new features to go along with it.
How Can I Contribute?
Glad you asked :P
Since there's a lot to do, there are many possibilities to help out!
Here's a list of things we would appreciate your help with:
- Are you a designer? We need people creating mockups of the new design, based on existing functionality and feature request!
- Are you a developer? We need people implementing the mockups, enhancing existing functionality, or adding new features!
- Are you good at organizing things? We could use some help with keeping on top of things during the hackathon and beyond!
- Are you a user? While we don't exactly need more bug reports, you could help by going through existing bugs to see if you can figure out how to reliably reproduce them.
For the designers, we have a Figma file consisting of more-or-less up-to-date mockups of implemented and planned screens. But since we essentially just need mockups in the form of static images, you can work with any design too you want!
For the developers, while Finamp uses the Flutter framework (which is based on the Dart programming language), any frontend experience should be enough to contribute, since the syntax is very straight-forward and the style system is pretty self-explanatory.
Even backend devs can help out here, since there are some features that are mostly independent of the UI, like our playback, queueing, and download system.
What's the Timeline?
The Hackathon will consist of three sections: The two power phases during the weekends, and an iteration phase during the week in-between.
First Power Phase:
This kicks of initial contributions, and should see the first finished implementations.
Start: Saturday, March 29th, around 10.30am UTC
End: Monday, March 31st, during the early morning hours :P
Iteration Phase:
During this phase, more complex implementations can be worked on, PRs can be reviewed, and designs can be discussed.
Start: Monday, March 31st, around 10.30am UTC
End: Saturday, April 5th, during the early morning hours
Second Power Phase:
This final phase is meant to finish up any remaining implementations and tie up any loose ends.
Start: Saturday, April 5th, around 10.30am UTC
End: Sunday, April 6th, during the early morning hours
"Frequently Asked" Questions
Why 9 days?
We know not everyone can dedicate an entire weekend to an online hackathon, so we decided to spread things out instead!
This also allows us to properly discuss any changes instead of rushing anything.
Where is this happening?
This is an online-only, digital Hackathon. Contributions and formal discussion will happen on Finamp's GitHub repository, while community chat, tech support, and informal discussion will happen on our beta Discord server.
How can I attend?
Just show up on Finamp's GitHub repository and/or our beta Discord server sometime during the hackathon!
The only thing we require is for you to have fun, engage with the community, and hopefully contribute something to Finamp!
What are the rewards?
Yes! We're giving out free Finamp stickers to everyone who contributes during the hackathon time frame. What constitutes a contribution can't be defined explicitly, and we can't give out stickers for just fixing a typo or adding a translation. But if you redesign a screen (design or implementation), add a new feature, or fix a bug, we'll be happy to send some stickers your way!
Keep in mind that Finamp is an open source project, and is a free app. Finamp itself doesn't make any money, so we're funding the stickers ourself, using mostly GitHub donations :)
